Sergio Porta

Biography

I am professor of Urban Design and Director of UDSU - Urban Design Studies Unit. I have been Head of Department of Architecture in 2011-14. I teach the MSc in Urban Design studio for students in Y5 with a background in Architecture as well as in various other areas. I am interested in what makes our cities a great place to live in, raise children, learn stuff, run businesses and have fun, for us as well as for the next generations, still remaining human. At the core of it all there is one game-changing lesson: the quality that makes our cities sound and enjoyable does not come by design. It comes by the uncoordinated efforts of people in time. Basically, it comes from history and evolution. Once you have digested this simple truth fully in all its aspects - and indeed it takes time - then everything changes. Adaptability becomes paramount, people become crucial, informal participation becomes more important than formal participation, and you as a designer begin thinking differently. Ultimately, ""design for change"" becomes much more than a buzzword: it means that your mission is just to ensure the conditions (primarily spatial and environmental, in our case) for those uncoordinated efforts to emerge and self-organize in a way that is good for all. We at UDSU pull together urban morphology, environmental psychology, ""classic"" urban planning analysis, spatial analysis, and community engagement into a science of urban design for change. We do all what we can to do that through an evidence-based approach across everything we do. For example, we are developing a new ground for understanding urban evolution by taking the long-standing analogy with biological evolution to a higher level, that of the empirical science. And yes, we love making masterplans, good-old masterplans that work in time by informing a truly democratic process of urban change in time.

Research Interest

Architecture